American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology Vol.21 329-341 November 2012. doi:10.1044/1058-0360(2012/11-0044)
© American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Right arrowCustom Print
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow My Folders
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow reprints & permissions
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Gabriel, A.
Right arrow Articles by Meulemans, T.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Gabriel, A.
Right arrow Articles by Meulemans, T.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Delicious   Add to Digg   Add to Facebook   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Research Article

Procedural Visual Learning in Children With Specific Language Impairment

Audrey Gabriela
Nicolas Stefaniakb
Christelle Maillarta
Xavier Schmitza
Thierry Meulemansa
a University of Liège, Belgium
b Cognition, Language, Emotions, Acquisitions (CLEA), University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France

Correspondence to Audrey Gabriel: audrey.gabriel{at}ulg.ac.be

Purpose: According to the procedural deficit hypothesis (PDH), difficulties in the procedural learning (PL) system may contribute to the language difficulties observed in children with specific language impairment (SLI).

Method: Fifteen children with SLI and their typically developing (TD) peers were compared on visual PL tasks—specifically, deterministic serial reaction time (SRT) tasks. In the first experiment, children with SLI and their TD peers performed the classical SRT task using a keyboard as response mode. In the second experiment, they performed the same SRT task but gave their responses through a touchscreen (instead of a keyboard) to reduce the motor and cognitive demands of the task.

Results: Although in Experiment 1, children with SLI demonstrated learning, they were slower and made more errors than did their TD peers. Nevertheless, these relative weaknesses disappeared when the nature of the response mode changed ( Experiment 2).

Conclusions: In this study, the authors report that children with SLI may exhibit sequential learning. Moreover, the generally slower reaction times observed in previous deterministic SRT studies may be explained by the response mode used. Thus, our findings are not consistent with the predictions of the PDH, and these findings suggest that language impairments in SLI are not sustained by poor procedural learning abilities.

Key Words: procedural learning, sequential learning, specific language impairment, child language disorder, serial reaction time


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Delicious Delicious   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Facebook Facebook   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?